


eulogy

by ilgaksu



Series: myth au [3]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Isn't that enough warning by itself, Kenma is Patroclus, Kuroo is Achilles, M/M, patrochilles au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2015-12-09
Packaged: 2018-05-05 21:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5390450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can’t make a boy into a weapon and then call him poetry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eulogy

**Author's Note:**

> Grief of the people is a translation of the name Achilles. It's definitely worth reading the original Patroclus/Achilles myth as a background to this.

They call him the best they’ve got. They call him their last chance. They call for him, over and over; child of Thetis, child of a king, child of ours. They claim ownership as kinship and muscle closer to Kuroo, make him into a golden boy to match his reflection in Kenma’s eyes, and when they pin all their hopes into him they don’t seem to remember that needles sting.

And Kuroo smiles for them, that practised, slick princeling smile that he’s been born to from the cradle, and Kenma hates the whole sorry pack of them.

*

“Cat’s cradle, again?” Kuroo says, leaning against the doorway, all coiled shoulders and amusement.

“Sword training, again?” Kenma mimics the curl and dip of Kuroo’s voice without looking up from his hands. He doesn’t have to look for the familiar weight of the weapon at Kuroo’s hip to sense it there.  Kuroo laughs, low and familiar, and crosses the room. He settles opposite Kenma, sets the oil lamp down. It casts chiaroscuro over the symmetry of his jaw and Kenma thinks, as he often does, _would have this been easier if you weren’t so beautiful?_ Kuroo holds out his hands and Kenma loops the cat’s cradle around them carefully, slowly, wary of tugging it out of place.

“Now you’ve caught me,” Kuroo says, Kuroo always says. Kenma rolls his eyes, as he always rolls his eyes. He feels the mocking tug of the Fates’ string hook around his ribs, leaving him mute and stumbling, wary and kittenish in the wake of Kuroo’s sweet private smile.

“You talk too much,” Kenma murmurs, and closes his eyes to better hear Kuroo laugh again.

*

“I’m not afraid of dying,” Kuroo tells Kenma fiercely in the night, voice tripping over them earnestly and the moon fat and slow and mocking outside. “I’m not afraid of dying, I’m not afraid, I’m not.”

They’re on a ship to a war, and Kuroo’s mother snarled as he boarded it without looking back. She did not acknowledge Kenma. She never has. He has never expected her to.

They’re on a ship to a war, and Kuroo’s mother hid Kuroo away with the women, braided his hair back and taught him to dance. Like all other things, Kuroo was a good student, and a fast learner, and soon outshone them all.

They’re on a ship to a war they will not come back from intact, and Kuroo’s mother told Kuroo the prophecy.

(Die young and acclaimed, exalted, a warrior-prince. Die young and fast and famous, or die dust-old in your bed and forgotten, and what sort of choice is that to give?)

Kuroo’s mother told Kuroo the prophecy and then the general arrived at the island with his quick-dart eyes and blackmailed a seventeen-year-old boy.

(He said _if you do not go, I will say how I found you_ , and Kuroo, the sharpness of his hips obscured in soft-dyed fabric and the angle of his eyes rounded in kohl, flushed. It could have been defiance; it could have been shame; either way, Kuroo went aboard and Kenma followed.)

The ship creaks on the bounty of the wine-dark sea. Kenma curls his hand in the hair at Kuroo’s nape and yanks, once and hard, and Kuroo gasps and he stutters to a halt where he sits.

“Don’t lie to me, Kuro,” Kenma says, slow and loud in the sudden hush of the dark. “Don’t you ever lie to me like that again,” and kisses Kuroo hard to even out the sting.

They’re on the sea to their death sentence. Kuroo’s hands shake in the night. Kenma wonders why the old always want to bleed youth’s gold dry to gild themselves; the next morning, he sees Kuroo laugh, and maybe he understands, even if he doesn’t want to.

*

Here’s the thing: the songs will make Kuroo beautiful, cast his skin into bronze and his eyes like stars in the heavens, because it’s much easier to love a hero if he’s symmetrical, if he’s fictional, if he’s perfect. And it’ll be wrong, it’ll all be wrong; Kuroo is mathematical in his proportions, the crooked asymmetry of his freckles dusting his shoulders, the slick knowing dark of his eyes like the curl of his laugh visualised. He has a birthmark on his shoulder blade and the bones of his ankles are strangely fragile. His hipbones leave bruises on Kenma’s thighs, and the arrowhead of his cheekbone digs into Kenma’s shoulder when they sleep curled, and he walks with a startling efficiency that’s nothing like the rush and languor of sex. You can’t make a boy into a weapon and then call him poetry, no matter how much polish you drip onto the ballads.

The ribs they will plate with gold are ticklish and they’ll soften his mouth, rewrite the curve of his lips to make history anew.  It will be as though the thin whiplash of them could be anything but appealing when he catches Kenma’s hands up to kiss them in dark corners, the gleam of his teeth and the breath in his lungs.

It’s easy to be born beautiful, Kenma knows; he managed it, after all, and all it ever got him was stares like knives. For the most part, that is. Sometimes when Kuroo looks at him, his eyes say worship and Kenma looks away. To be worshipped is to be above it all, and Kenma wants to be touched by this improbable, impossible legacy of a boy before the sand runs out the hourglass and all Kenma has left is the songs.  

They’ll break his bones apart to fit him into the mould of their armour. Kenma already knows he won’t listen when people chant Kuroo’s name.

*

They’ll break his bones apart to fit him into the mould of their armour. Kenma stands in Kuroo's gold breastplate and ignores the wide scared eyes of the boys strapping it into place.

“It doesn’t fit you,”one of the sentries says finally, and flushes puce-cold when Kenma looks at them. The silence is a presence more than absence. Kenma longs for anchor but his hands are empty and Kuroo is cut adrift from him.

“I never expected it to,” he says shortly, waits for the weight of Kuroo’s shield, and nobody says anything else after that. _Would this have been easier if you weren’t so beautiful?_ Kenma bows his head for the helmet like a sacrifice, and finally, he feels it: the weight that Kuroo’s been carrying all along. He almost laughs in understanding. You’ve caught me. Gimlet-eyed, he watches them lace his sandals and tastes the dust in his mouth.

*

 _Grief of the people,_ they call him. _Best of the Greeks and grief of the people._ His mother calls him _legacy_ and the army calls him _hope_ and Kenma calls him by his name because no one else seems to, Kuroo’s sword hand on Kenma’s jaw, his hip, grounding Kenma in his bones.

“How many times do I have to die for you?” Kuroo gasps, the slack red bite of his mouth and the sweat as circlet. The piecemeal glint of his body in the half-light of the dawn and the banked glitter of his eyes and the bright high bruise on his throat. They don’t talk about love. Kenma doesn’t believe in waxing lyrical on the obvious. Kuroo looks at Kenma’s face instead and his groan is half a laugh. “Clearly several.”

He lets himself be hauled back in. _You’ve caught me._

*

_How many times do I have to die for you?_

Just the once. Just the once is enough. Just the once is all Kenma has to give.

And he resents it, resents it all and always has: Kuroo’s glory-starving eyes, the weight of a crown on his brow, the eyes of older men watching Kuroo slip in the blood of their enemies, the cheers that sound like roars that sound like lions waiting to eat the both of them alive. He resents the telling of a story that isn’t true but sounds pretty in the telling, he resents the war, he resents the idea that Kuroo chose the war because the war was just, he resents the idea that he’ll die for anything more than Kuroo’s pride, and that the image of Kuroo as a legendary prodigy will take Kenma down with it.

And Kenma still goes on down; to the battlefield, to the bloodhouse, to beyond, and isn’t it irony that he’ll die being noticed by everyone in two fucking armies? Isn’t it irony that he’ll die for being seen? Isn’t it just -  

They don’t talk about love, but Kenma’s sure someone else will. They always have done.

*

Death is faster, and slower, and altogether less and more than Kenma expects.

Just one more thing the songs will get wrong.

*

By the time Kuroo takes up the threads of the narrative, some time has passed and he’s burned a lot of bridges himself, anyway. The door to the Underworld unfolds for him with all the elegance of Kenma’s hands gesturing. The grief burnt out a lot for him, but his ankle still aches, even though it’s incorporeal: the body remembers. He walks through without looking back. Perhaps he should have looked back for his mother, one last goodbye glance, but why break the habit of a lifetime?

Iwaizumi is waiting for him, sombre-eyed, and pulls Kyoutani to the side as Kuroo approaches.

“A personal greeting, huh,” Kuroo says. “You’re too kind. Do all mortals get this, or am I just special?”

Iwaizumi frowns and his eyes flash. He turns away, and Kuroo follows in the footsteps of the god of death; they descend, and Kuroo’s ankle still aches. He can hear faint whispering, or so he thinks, but every time he tries to focus on it, it’s gone. _Best of the Greeks. Grief of the people and best of the Greeks._

“Can you hear that?” Kuroo asks, and Iwaizumi’s laugh is dry, rustles through them both like wind through old bones.  

“You’re going to get a lot of that here,” Iwaizumi says. “Get used to it.”

“I already am.”

And they walk on.

“They are mourning in the world above tonight,” Iwaizumi says softly, as they round another corner. Kuroo can hear water. He is sure he can hear water.

“Aren’t they always?”

Iwaizumi laughs again, and this time it sounds like dust. Kuroo has an abrupt memory of Kenma’s eyes blinking awake, the dust motes in the air and the gold; Kenma’s eyes still and open, the ash in the air and the gold gone stale whilst Kuroo wept blood, his breath catching in his throat like repentance, wiping the dirt from Kenma’s pale face. His throat tightens. His ankle still aches.

“I thought it would stop hurting,” he says, and watches the dark curl of Iwaizumi’s shoulder when he shrugs.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds like perhaps he is. Kuroo can still hear the water. They round another corner. Kuroo has been walking in the god of death’s footsteps for what feels like a very long time now. The walls still whisper how the world above cries at Kuroo’s pyre. Kuroo doesn’t listen. He listens for the water.

He is, Kuroo realises abruptly, very tired. The grief, the rage of it, had torn through him and sustained him and it’s only now he realises that when he burnt those bridges he burnt a hole through himself too. He can feel the scorch marks about his chest. His ankle aches.

And then there is water. The Styx is terrible in the way all feats of nature are terrible, a great roaring rush of whispers, the dusky glimmer of shades like silver in low light. Kuroo stands there, alone in the midst of this undulating mass of underworld. He wishes he still had his sword, and Iwaizumi -

Iwaizumi turns and smiles.

“He’s been waiting for you,” he says, gently, and points: Kuroo turns to look and over his own shoulder he sees cat’s cradle, gold eyes, crossed legs by the bank of the Styx. Kuroo’s breath trembles in his lungs, hooked. _You’ve caught me._

All of a sudden, his ankle stops aching.  

 

 


End file.
